Podcasting: the Godfather of Long-Form Content Marketing

Many businesses struggle to find the deeply invested audience that will become brand ambassadors and repeat customers. These are the high margin clients… They buy the platinum package, the extend-warranty and the VIP face-to-face service agreement.

However what many businesses find out very quickly about content marketing is it takes time, effort, patience and practice to generate the type of high margin business we need to run our business effectively.

Podcasting is the godfather of long form content marketing

The idea behind long form content marketing is the longer we can keep a perspective leads attention focused on our content the better chance we have of actually capturing them as a lead and the more qualified they will be.

Many experts would tell you to create content in short bursts. We hear this rhetoric attached to blog posts and video all the time.

“Never create a video longer than three minutes…”

”Don’t exceed 750 words with your blog posts…”

The thought process here is consumers on the Internet have such short attention spans they will not stay focused on our content for more than a minute or two.

Long form content marketing, specifically podcasting, flushes that idea down the toilet…

…create better content in a format your audience enjoys and they will stay longer.

Enter the podcast.

The podcast audience, by their nature, is deeply invested in the content they consume. I call podcasting the godfather of long form content marketing for two reasons:

Podcasting has been around for a long time yet very few people are aware the power it yields

Podcasting takes your audience outside the Internet world most of us create content in, operating by a different set of rules.

Yes, our podcast audience can listen to episodes online, but that is NOT how must podcast listeners consume content. The podcast follows consumers outside the world of the Internet into their everyday lives and allows them to consume our content on their schedule when they’re away from a computer screen.

This is an incredibly powerful concept.

With a blog post or video content, our audience has to be in front of the computer screen or iPad or smart phone. When someone is consuming a text-based post or watching a video they cannot be multitasking.

Think about that for a second, if you create a video the reason it has to be three minutes or less and you have to break up the content into a intro bumper and outro bumper and add bloopers is to keep your audience from multitasking. As soon as your audience begins to multitask, your message is no longer being delivered.

This isn’t the case with a podcast. Your audience can be running on a treadmill, driving home from work or working on paperwork at their desk. With a podcast all your audience needs is a set of speakers.

Your podcast goes where your audience is instead of your audience having to come to you…

27 Minutes of Authority

We focus on content marketing and social media marketing strategies all in the quest to Win the Battle for Attention Online. That’s 33 minutes of me, establishing my authority as an expert in content marketing and social media marketing. I can tell you from my Google Analytics account that the average person who reads one of my blog posts stays for two minutes and seven seconds. Whereas the average listener of my podcast stays for 27 minutes.

So if I’m able to produce one text-based blog post every week that produces two minutes and seven seconds of audience focus versus a podcast which produces 27 minutes of audience focus, in which format am I gaining more attention?

Yes the audience that listens to the podcast is less in terms of sheer volume numbers but the people that do listen to the podcast are so deeply invested in me as an authority in content marketing that they are willing to spend 27 minutes of their day with me.

This is my target audience.

If you’re struggling to determine who your target audience is, then a podcast is a great tool to carve out that audience.

Anyone who is willing to spend 27 minutes listening to you talk about what your area of expertise wants to do business with you… at a minimum they’ll take your phone call… at a very minimum they’ll open and respond to your email.

The Rub

There is a barrier to entry with podcasting. It’s not as simple to get a podcast going as buying a domain name and one-click installing WordPress. That being said there are plenty of “How to start a podcast” tutorials (I recommend this one by Pat Flynn) from very reputable sources that make the process of starting a podcast very easy.

Having published 20 episodes {view my podcast episode index} of the Content Warfare Podcast over the last six months, I can tell you without question it has been my greatest decision as a content marketer.

My audience is more invested in what I have to say than they’ve ever been before and I’ve tapped into a completely new audience of people that would have never visited my blog or watched any of my videos on YouTube.

These are people who consume content on iTunes, Stitcher, Zune and Blackberry and if you want to capture them as a potential audience, you have to start a podcast.